Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937283
Huda Tayob
Bellstat Junction and Sekko's Place are two markets in Cape Town established by migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. They are perhaps better understood as black markets existing within a lineage of global black urbanisms, past and future. These sites occupy a slippery legality, sited in the peripheral margins and shadows of the central city of Cape Town. They operate across grammars of transaction and care. An architectural reading of black markets enables a drawing out and stitching together of the constituents of these sites: of site and story, of domesticity and infrastructure, of publicness and transnational networks. Adopting the term black markets for these sites calls attention to the racialization of these spaces, and their emergence as sites of possibility, precarity, and care in the face of protracted crises.
{"title":"Opaque Infrastructure","authors":"Huda Tayob","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937283","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Bellstat Junction and Sekko's Place are two markets in Cape Town established by migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. They are perhaps better understood as black markets existing within a lineage of global black urbanisms, past and future. These sites occupy a slippery legality, sited in the peripheral margins and shadows of the central city of Cape Town. They operate across grammars of transaction and care. An architectural reading of black markets enables a drawing out and stitching together of the constituents of these sites: of site and story, of domesticity and infrastructure, of publicness and transnational networks. Adopting the term black markets for these sites calls attention to the racialization of these spaces, and their emergence as sites of possibility, precarity, and care in the face of protracted crises.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45101064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937325
L. Pappalardo
For the Guarani Mbya, ka'aguy (Atlantic Forest) is sacred. Yet, only 12 percent of the Atlantic Forest's original coverage remains. A portion of that is in Jaraguá Peak. Two hundred years ago, São Paulo was ka'aguy. São Paulo's urban growth and the expansion of infrastructural networks (roads, power lines, dams) have disrupted Guarani infrastructures (the presence of Atlantic Forest, the continuity of paths between Guarani villages, access to clean water). Nonetheless, Guarani communities in São Paulo remake Guarani geographies every day, resisting Atlantic Forest encroachment and circumventing colonial networks. Guarani communities in the north and south of São Paulo hold a crucial infrastructural and environmental role for the entire city, increasing São Paulo's environmental security by recovering degraded soils and recuperating Atlantic Forest areas. This project maps the history of infrastructural expansion in Jaraguá Peak. It represents the history of each infrastructural layer (roads, telecommunication towers, power lines) in sectional maps that expose long-term changes on the ground.
{"title":"Mapping Grounds for Infrastructural Reparations in Jaraguá Peak","authors":"L. Pappalardo","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937325","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 For the Guarani Mbya, ka'aguy (Atlantic Forest) is sacred. Yet, only 12 percent of the Atlantic Forest's original coverage remains. A portion of that is in Jaraguá Peak. Two hundred years ago, São Paulo was ka'aguy. São Paulo's urban growth and the expansion of infrastructural networks (roads, power lines, dams) have disrupted Guarani infrastructures (the presence of Atlantic Forest, the continuity of paths between Guarani villages, access to clean water). Nonetheless, Guarani communities in São Paulo remake Guarani geographies every day, resisting Atlantic Forest encroachment and circumventing colonial networks. Guarani communities in the north and south of São Paulo hold a crucial infrastructural and environmental role for the entire city, increasing São Paulo's environmental security by recovering degraded soils and recuperating Atlantic Forest areas. This project maps the history of infrastructural expansion in Jaraguá Peak. It represents the history of each infrastructural layer (roads, telecommunication towers, power lines) in sectional maps that expose long-term changes on the ground.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48283385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937311
P. Khanolkar
The expansionist mode of neoliberal urbanization relies on a subtractive logic that transforms lives, habitats, and rhythms along its path as both expendable and profitable. This essay uses the conceptual lens of “passages” to read how urban entities, those rendered “expendable,” seep back in through different urban passages and play the game of urbanization. These passages are not given, but constellated by drawing disparate urban entities into a relationship. In them, urban entities, although deemed expendable, are in medias res and incomplete; they are the mediums in which life takes form; and they have the “abilities” to take on many forms. The essay thus departs from the demographic and territorial notions of “what is urban,” to explore the urban as a constitutive medium composed of numerous passages. It asks, What is at play in them? What life forms in passing? And how might we conceive of Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk down South?
{"title":"In Passing","authors":"P. Khanolkar","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937311","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The expansionist mode of neoliberal urbanization relies on a subtractive logic that transforms lives, habitats, and rhythms along its path as both expendable and profitable. This essay uses the conceptual lens of “passages” to read how urban entities, those rendered “expendable,” seep back in through different urban passages and play the game of urbanization. These passages are not given, but constellated by drawing disparate urban entities into a relationship. In them, urban entities, although deemed expendable, are in medias res and incomplete; they are the mediums in which life takes form; and they have the “abilities” to take on many forms. The essay thus departs from the demographic and territorial notions of “what is urban,” to explore the urban as a constitutive medium composed of numerous passages. It asks, What is at play in them? What life forms in passing? And how might we conceive of Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk down South?","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46754477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937297
I. Peano
This essay explores the author's engaged research trajectory into several agro-industrial enclaves in contemporary Italy. Stemming from solidarity work in support of migrant laborers living in slums and camps, and of their demands for legal recognition and better living and work conditions, the essay shows how the interrogation of these spaces’ multiple, layered pasts helps to better understand and contrast forms of containment, extraction, and racialized and gendered violence in the present. In particular, the essay pits narratives that portray such agro-industrial enclaves and the people that inhabit them as anachronistic residues against deep genealogies of racial capitalism and of the rhetorical tropes that sustained them. Carceral-like containment and, more generally, spatial segregation are shown to run through and thus be foundational in the history of capitalist agriculture, across geographies that link Italy to global flows.
{"title":"Spatiotemporal Stratifications","authors":"I. Peano","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937297","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores the author's engaged research trajectory into several agro-industrial enclaves in contemporary Italy. Stemming from solidarity work in support of migrant laborers living in slums and camps, and of their demands for legal recognition and better living and work conditions, the essay shows how the interrogation of these spaces’ multiple, layered pasts helps to better understand and contrast forms of containment, extraction, and racialized and gendered violence in the present. In particular, the essay pits narratives that portray such agro-industrial enclaves and the people that inhabit them as anachronistic residues against deep genealogies of racial capitalism and of the rhetorical tropes that sustained them. Carceral-like containment and, more generally, spatial segregation are shown to run through and thus be foundational in the history of capitalist agriculture, across geographies that link Italy to global flows.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45026523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937354
M. C. Overholt
In the midst of the global SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological crisis unfolds another contagion: the eviction epidemic. This essay attends to the work of Moms for Housing, an organization of formerly homeless and marginally housed Black mothers in Oakland, California who have organized to confront dispossession, real-estate speculation, and the privatization of housing. Using Black feminist and queer of color intellectual frameworks as ciphers through which to interpret and properly attribute weight to the organization's activism, the essay argues that Moms for Housing not only offers potential flightlines toward a post-property future—one in which housing is positioned as a basic human right—but also a generative critique of the home as a site of racialized and gendered subject formation. Indeed, through their work, the reconception of kinship formation and territorial formation are understood to be mutually constitutive, abolitionist projects.
{"title":"“Housing Is a Human Right”","authors":"M. C. Overholt","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937354","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the midst of the global SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological crisis unfolds another contagion: the eviction epidemic. This essay attends to the work of Moms for Housing, an organization of formerly homeless and marginally housed Black mothers in Oakland, California who have organized to confront dispossession, real-estate speculation, and the privatization of housing. Using Black feminist and queer of color intellectual frameworks as ciphers through which to interpret and properly attribute weight to the organization's activism, the essay argues that Moms for Housing not only offers potential flightlines toward a post-property future—one in which housing is positioned as a basic human right—but also a generative critique of the home as a site of racialized and gendered subject formation. Indeed, through their work, the reconception of kinship formation and territorial formation are understood to be mutually constitutive, abolitionist projects.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44161421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937368
Janette Kim
In 2021, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) purchased Esther's Orbit Room—the last remaining venue of Oakland's West Coast blues scene—to build a haven for Black culture and livelihood. As a novel system of land ownership inspired by land trusts, cooperatives, and social movements, EB PREC orchestrates local, collective governance to harness the staying power of ownership and resist its commodification. EB PREC's complex institutional structure is mirrored in the manifold enclosures of the Orbit Room property, which expands, contracts, and subdivides an ever-contested form of parcelization. As an architectural designer and member of EB PREC, the author combines an analysis of the Orbit Room's as-built conditions with an institutional portrait of EB PREC. This article asks how alignment and misalignment between ownership and property lines can enable—and preclude—the decommodification of property and transform it into an enduring source of power for those so long excluded from it.
{"title":"Manifold Enclosures","authors":"Janette Kim","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937368","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 2021, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) purchased Esther's Orbit Room—the last remaining venue of Oakland's West Coast blues scene—to build a haven for Black culture and livelihood. As a novel system of land ownership inspired by land trusts, cooperatives, and social movements, EB PREC orchestrates local, collective governance to harness the staying power of ownership and resist its commodification. EB PREC's complex institutional structure is mirrored in the manifold enclosures of the Orbit Room property, which expands, contracts, and subdivides an ever-contested form of parcelization. As an architectural designer and member of EB PREC, the author combines an analysis of the Orbit Room's as-built conditions with an institutional portrait of EB PREC. This article asks how alignment and misalignment between ownership and property lines can enable—and preclude—the decommodification of property and transform it into an enduring source of power for those so long excluded from it.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65961808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937241
Solomon Benjamin, Alioscia Castronovo, Lucía Cavallero, Cristina Cielo, Véronica Gago, P. Guma, R. Gupte, Victoria Habermehl, Lana Salman, Prasad Shetty, AbdouMaliq Simone, Constance Smith, João Tonucci
What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, which sustain their imaginations of well-being as part of a process of being with others—in households, neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. What is it that different kinds of workers have in common; what links them; where does the household begin and end; what is the difference between productive and reproductive work?
{"title":"Urban Popular Economies","authors":"Solomon Benjamin, Alioscia Castronovo, Lucía Cavallero, Cristina Cielo, Véronica Gago, P. Guma, R. Gupte, Victoria Habermehl, Lana Salman, Prasad Shetty, AbdouMaliq Simone, Constance Smith, João Tonucci","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937241","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is a life worth living and how is it concretely actualized by an urban majority making often unanticipated, unformatted uses of the urban to engender livelihoods in a dynamic and open-ended process? This is the key question undertaken in this collectively written piece. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, which sustain their imaginations of well-being as part of a process of being with others—in households, neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. What is it that different kinds of workers have in common; what links them; where does the household begin and end; what is the difference between productive and reproductive work?","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43109722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584652
Erica Robles-Anderson, A. Appadurai
{"title":"Editors' Letter: A Critique of Pure Dumbfoundedness","authors":"Erica Robles-Anderson, A. Appadurai","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584652","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48924129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9584764
Joanne Nucho
This essay describes an emerging “post-grid imaginary” that is informing visions of future collapse, growing scarcity, and deepening infrastructural fragmentation. By examining electrical grid failures in Lebanon and California, we can move beyond developmentalist assumptions about the supposedly different trajectories of the so-called Global North and South. The post-grid imaginary is at the center of a present and future struggle that is continuous with a global process that looks a lot like structural adjustment in the “Global South” and rampant privatization and austerity in the “Global North.” As states turn away from promises of endless expansion and universal access, the post-grid imaginary is one way in which states, private utilities, and individuals respond to the urgent need to transform the existing energy system. While a post-grid imaginary is not inevitable, it is an increasingly visible approach that can lead to geographical disconnection, uneven access, and infrastructural abandonment.
{"title":"Post-grid Imaginaries: Electricity, Generators, and the Future of Energy","authors":"Joanne Nucho","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9584764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9584764","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay describes an emerging “post-grid imaginary” that is informing visions of future collapse, growing scarcity, and deepening infrastructural fragmentation. By examining electrical grid failures in Lebanon and California, we can move beyond developmentalist assumptions about the supposedly different trajectories of the so-called Global North and South. The post-grid imaginary is at the center of a present and future struggle that is continuous with a global process that looks a lot like structural adjustment in the “Global South” and rampant privatization and austerity in the “Global North.” As states turn away from promises of endless expansion and universal access, the post-grid imaginary is one way in which states, private utilities, and individuals respond to the urgent need to transform the existing energy system. While a post-grid imaginary is not inevitable, it is an increasingly visible approach that can lead to geographical disconnection, uneven access, and infrastructural abandonment.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43926249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}